When They Came To An Oregon Town To Take Pictures Of The Fires, Armed Locals Thought They Were Antifa Arsonists

They weren't.
Christopher MillerBuzzFeed News ContributorJane LytvynenkoBuzzFeed News Reporter


Posted on September 10, 2020

Deborah Bloom / Getty Images

Gabriel Trumbly, a Portland videographer who has spent roughly 90 of the past 100 days capturing the protests, wanted to take footage of the forest fires raging in Oregon. So on Wednesday night, the 29-year-old Army veteran set out with his partner, Jennifer Paulsen, 24, to see what was happening near her childhood home of Molalla, a town of 9,000 people known for its annual rodeo, the Buckeroo. Fires surrounding the town were so intense they had prompted a level 3 “GO NOW” warning to evacuate.

Little did they know when they arrived that Trumbly and Paulsen's presence would spark national rumors that far-left activists were starting fires across the West Coast.

After parking their car on the side of a road, the couple pulled on gas masks and shot video of towering flames. As they worked, they encountered people who had rigged a garden hose to a water tank in the bed of a truck and were trying to put out a fire in the driveway. Trumbly and Paulsen briefly spoke with them, as well as a driver who asked them if they needed any water.

Trumbly and Paulsen, both of whom spoke to BuzzFeed News by phone from Portland on Thursday, said the interactions seemed “normal.” They said the fire was moving quickly, so they didn’t stay long in Molalla. “We thought it was getting a bit dangerous, so we left,” Trumbly said.


Gabriel Trumbly



But shortly after they left, Paulsen began checking Twitter and Facebook to see news about the fires. She noticed that residents were sharing information about their car, including detailed descriptions of its appearance and license plate. The posts claimed they were members of antifa, an amorphous collection of left-wing groups that the president has called “a terrorist organization,” who had come to Molalla from Portland to commit arson.

Authorities in Oregon have struggled for days to fight apocalyptic wildfires that have burned over 800 square miles, forced thousands to evacuate their homes, and killed at least three people. Now they are also fighting a wave of rumors spreading on social media that the blazes were set by left-wing activists linked to the Portland protests.

The panic in Oregon appeared to stem from a woman in a Facebook group called Molalla NOW, meant for locals to share information about community events.

The post, which Trumbly shared a screenshot of on Twitter, claimed he and Paulsen had started a fire and misidentified them as “two guys wearing gas masks and ‘press’ vests.” It quickly garnered hundreds of reactions and replies.

“It blew up with comments!” Paulsen said. “People were saying, ‘Send people out with guns!’ It said we were antifa.”

Paulsen, who graduated from Molalla High School, even knew some of the people in the group. Now she and Trumbly were being hunted by a group of armed men on the town’s streets.

BuzzFeed News was unable to identify the armed men, but a spokesperson for the Molalla Police Department confirmed their presence by phone and two Portland-based freelance reporters who visited the town on Thursday posted photographs of what they said were three armed men who threatened them.



Jennifer Paulsen@JenMP96
Apparantly I came very close to being shot by a group of 'vigilantes' from my hometown tonight... My partner and I were followed in his car, people were posting his license plate all over various community pages, making multiple reports to the police. After a conversation 1/?09:37 AM - 10 Sep 2020
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A vague Facebook message by the Molalla Police Department posted Wednesday evening fed suspicion among the rumor- and fire-stricken residents.

“To those of you still in and around town, please report any suspicious activity (strange people walking around/looking into cars and houses/vehicles driving through neighborhoods that don't belong there) to 911 immediately,” the MPD post read.

“Make them dig a grave then shoot them,” read one of the posts calling for them to be shot.

Concerned about dozens of similar posts, Trumbly called the Molalla Police Department around 1 a.m. “to clear things up,” he said.

He said an officer told him several calls had come in since he and Paulsen left Molalla about antifa members being seen in the town and a group of armed men patrolling the streets.

But it wasn’t until early Thursday morning that the police department updated its post.

“EDIT/CLARIFICATION: This is about possible looters, not antifa or setting of fires,” the updated post read. “There has been NO antifa in town as of this posting at 02:00 am. Please, folks, stay calm and use common sense. Stay inside or leave the area.”

Paulsen, who graduated from Molalla High School, even knew some of the people in the group. Now she and Trumbly were being hunted by a group of armed men on the town’s streets.

While police in Washington did make an arson arrest yesterday, it was long after the fires began spreading, and in a different state.

Besides the Molalla Police Department, the Medford Police Department, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office have published appeals on their Facebook pages in the past 24 hours for the public to stop spreading false information connecting antifa to the Oregon fires.

“Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires in DOUGLAS COUNTY, OREGON,” wrote the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.

Acknowledging the incident, a Molalla Police Department hotline operator told BuzzFeed News Thursday that the department has “gotten calls about antifa arsonists and more [...] We‘ve gotten calls about everything and anything.” The operator also confirmed reports on social media of armed locals patrolling the town’s streets.

“It’s certainly hindering our ability to do our job more effectively.”

Lt. Mike Budreau of the Medford Police told BuzzFeed News that his department had been inundated with unsubstantiated reports about members of antifa and the Proud Boys, a right-wing group. “It’s been problematic and it takes time away from us when we're dealing with not only these fires, we have missing people, missing pets,” he said. “It’s certainly hindering our ability to do our job more effectively.”

The narrative was quickly seized upon by provocateurs. Right-wing website the Biggs Report claimed that antifa members were starting fires throughout the Pacific Northwest. “Possible ANTIFA Member Arrested For Starting Fires In Washington State,” said the post. A Washington state volunteer firefighter service linked to that story on Facebook, receiving 56 shares before the platform removed it.

At the same time, the Biggs Report, founded by a former InfoWars contributor, attempted to knock down rumors of their own, posting a second story that purported to debunk claims that members of far-right group the Proud Boys had started fires of their own. “The Boys Did Nothing Wrong!” said the story.

The group, which the FBI has labeled “extremist” and having “ties to white nationalism,” shared both stories on its Telegram channel.

The antifa narrative was also encouraged by a failed Republican Senate candidate in Oregon. His tweet was retweeted over 8,000 times and a screenshot of it spread on pro-Trump Instagram channels. It was also pushed by a Trump supporter affiliated with conservative nonprofit students organization Turning Point USA in Seattle. Her tweet went viral. “These fires are allegedly linked to Antifa and the Riots,” she wrote.

The rumor has been posted to virtually every social media network, including TikTok and the anonymous messaging board 4chan.

Despite the rampant misinformation, some people were attempting to clarify the situation.

“Ok we gotta clear this up now,” said one person on Facebook alongside a Bureau of Land Management announcement of area closures. “Blm does NOT stand for Black lives matter in this in reference to the fires.”

“They are ones who manages the lands and watch for fires ect,” the person continued. “I think the acronym is causing confusion making people assume its ‘antifa’ before factchecking. local radio refer to them as blm too but means the government program not the protests.... thats where our hysteria is coming from.”

Paulsen said the ordeal has spooked and shocked her. “I know these people or I know their families, and they’re treating me like I’m an outsider, even though that’s where I went to high school. That’s where my parents live,” Paulsen said. “They were writing [on Facebook], “Shoot now, ask questions later. You don’t want your house catching on fire.’”

For the record, Trumbly and Paulsen said they are not members of antifa, although they are against fascism.

September 11, 2020, at 8:23 a.m.


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Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.

Jane Lytvynenko is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Toronto, Canada.

Portland, Ore., mayor halts use of tear gas on protesters

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Portland, Ore., Mayor Tom Wheeler on Thursday ordered police to stop using tear gas on protesters after months of demonstrations against police brutality and racism.

The ban will last "until further notice," he said in a statement.

"It's time for everyone to reduce the violence in our community," Wheeler said. "We all want change. We all have the opportunity and obligation to create change. We all want to focus on the fundamental issue at hand -- justice for Black people and all people of color."

There have been daily protests in the city since late May after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked global demonstrations.

Lawsuits have targeted federal and local law enforcement's use of tear gas against Portland protesters, including, at times, against those taking part in peaceful demonstrations. In some cases, demonstrators began carrying leaf blowers with them to deflect the gas away from them.

Wheeler said his order came as the result of a review on the use of tear gas by the Oregon State Legislature and a Joint Committee on Transparent Policing and Use of Force Reform.

He likewise called on protesters to halt violence and vandalism, including throwing projectiles at police, and setting debris and buildings on fire.

"Arson, vandalism and violence are not going to drive change in this community," he said. "I expect the police to arrest people who engage in criminal acts. I expect the district attorney to prosecute those who commit criminal acts. And I expect the rest of the criminal justice system to hold those individuals accountable. We must stand together as a community against violence and for progress."

Amnesty International said last month that U.S. law enforcement has committed dozens of human rights violations throughout the months of protests, including the use of "militarized equipment" such as tear gas and pepper spray against activists, journalists, legal observers and street medics.

 The US Sanctioned One Of Rudy Giuliani’s Ukrainian Allies For Election Interference

Andriy Derkach has helped Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, with his campaign to discredit Joe Biden.

Christopher MillerBuzzFeed  September 10, 2020

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Rudy Giuliani

The Trump administration on Thursday blacklisted four Russia-linked individuals for attempting to influence the US election, including a Ukrainian lawmaker it called “an active Russian agent” who has helped Rudy Giuliani dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

The sanctions come amid growing warnings from US intelligence services about Russia’s efforts to meddle in the upcoming presidential election, but also as President Donald Trump continues to downplay the Kremlin’s activities aimed at America.


The biggest name added to the list is that of Andriy Derkach, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, who the Treasury Department said in a statement “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services.”

Derkach is part of a ragtag group of Ukrainian operatives working with Giuliani and hoping to help congressional Republicans surface damaging details about Biden and his family ahead of the election to benefit Trump.

“Derkach and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that Derkach "maintains close ties to Russian intelligence and sought to influence the views of American voters through a Russian-directed covert influence campaign centered on manipulating the American political process to advance Russia’s malign interests in Ukraine. This operation was designed to culminate prior to Election Day."


In a statement sent to BuzzFeed News, Derkach called the US move to sanction him "revenge" by Biden's "deep state associates" and "a preventative response" to a press conference he said he will hold early next week where he said he plans to reveal "Dem[ocrat] corruption."

"Revenge is an integral part of their regular activities against Ukrainian investigators, journalists, experts who reveal more and more new schemes of international corruption," Derkach said.

"Such information from the US Treasury Department opens up the opportunity for me to defend my interests in the legal field — in court," he added.

Over the past few months, Derkach has released several audio tapes that purport to capture phone conversations between Biden and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko while the two were in office. The recordings have done nothing to substantiate, let alone advance, the accusations from Trump, Giuliani, and Republicans that Biden abused his power in Ukraine.


In July, Derkach said what he has released so far is “really only a small part of the vast volume of records” and that all of it has been “transferred to Ukrainian and American law enforcement agencies.”

Derkach also said he had sent materials to Senate Republicans investigating alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, a right-wing conspiracy theory that has been debunked.

The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, who leads the Senate Homeland Security Committee heading the Biden investigation, has denied receiving materials from Derkach.

The Treasury Department suggested Derkach’s actions amounted to an attempt to undermine the November election. It said the designation of Derkach was focused on exposing malign influence campaigns from Russia and protecting the upcoming elections from foreign interference.


“This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated,” the department’s statement read.

Derkach was schooled at a KGB academy in Moscow. He became a Ukrainian lawmaker and is remembered for voting for a Kremlin-like set of anti-protest laws that passed during the country’s pro-democracy revolution in 2014. In an interview with BuzzFeed News in July, he denied working for Russia and interfering in the US election.

Derkach was mentioned in a statement from William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, in August about Russia using a range of measures to primarily denigrate Biden and what the country sees as an anti-Russia “establishment.”

“Derkach is spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls — to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party,” Evanina said.

The Treasury Department on Thursday also sanctioned three Russian nationals: Artem Lifshits, Anton Andreyev, and Darya Aslanova — all residents of St. Petersburg.

It named them as employees of the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency — an operation linked to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, an ally of President Vladimir Putin's — and said they supported the IRA’s cryptocurrency accounts.

“The IRA uses cryptocurrency to fund activities in furtherance of their ongoing malign influence operations around the world,” the statement said.

UPDATE
September 10, 2020, at 12:37 p.m.


This story was updated with a comment from Andriy Derkach.

UPDATE
September 10, 2020, at 11:51 a.m.


This story was updated with a statement from Mike Pompeo.


MORE ON THIS
Ukrainian Operatives Are Gearing Up Again To Take On The Bidens. They Say They Have Giuliani And Republicans On Their Side.

Christopher Miller · July 24, 2020

Christopher Miller is a Kyiv-based American journalist and editor.

KARMA IS A BITCH

A prominent Ukrainian religious leader, who said earlier this year COVID-19 was "God's punishment" for same-sex marriage, has tested positive for the virus.

ORTHODOXY IS MEDIEVAL

Patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine Filaret, seen here in Ukraine on May 15, 2019, said in March the pandemic was divine punishment for the "sinfulness of humanity." File Photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A prominent Ukrainian religious leader, who said earlier this year COVID-19 was "God's punishment" for same-sex marriage, has tested positive for the virus.

Patriarch Filaret, leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate, was hospitalized and diagnosed with the disease last week, the church said.

The church said earlier this week the 91-year-old Filaret was in "stable" condition and is being treated for the illness.

In March, he told Ukrainian television that the pandemic was divine punishment for the "sins of men and the sinfulness of humanity."

"First of all, I mean same-sex marriage," he specified.

"As the head of the church and as a man, the Patriarch has the freedom to express his views, which are based on morality."

The Kiev Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church comprises 25% of the country's nearly 30 million Orthodox followers.

The church said shortly after Filaret's comments that they didn't violate any Ukrainian law.

Court: Census must count undocumented immigrants for apportionment
SEPT. 10, 2020 

Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 29. A federal court approved an injunction blocking President Donald Trump's memorandum ordering the census not to count undocumented immigrants for apportionment. File Photo by Tasos Katopodis/UPI | License Photo

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A federal court on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump's order preventing undocumented immigrants from being included in the census count to determine congressional seats.

The special three-judge panel in New York unanimously approved an injunction against Trump's July order. They didn't rule on whether the order is unconstitutional, but said it would cause harm for the next decade, until the next census is conducted.

"We declare the presidential memorandum to be an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to the president by statute," the panel ruled.

Trump's memorandum ordered that undocumented immigrants should not be counted for the purpose of apportionment in the 2020 census, meaning they wouldn't be considered when determining how many representatives each state gets in the House.

The Trump administration at the time said excluding undocumented immigrants "from the apportionment base is more consonant with the principles of representative democracy underpinning our system of government."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, welcomed the ruling.

"The law is clear: Everyone gets counted in the census -- you can't pick and choose," the organization said.

The Trump administration lost another legal challenge last year after it attempted to include a question on the census asking whether the respondent was living in the United States legally. Challengers feared that such a question would cause undocumented immigrants not to fill out the census for fear of being targeted for deportation or other actions.

 

A Whistleblower Has Accused Top DHS Officials Of Lying About Border Threats To Support Trump's False Claims

The complaint also accuses DHS officials of suppressing intelligence reports on Russia and making false statements to Congress.

Adolfo FloresBuzzFeed News Reporter

Last updated on September 9, 2020,

Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf

A rare whistleblower complaint released Wednesday detailed behind-the-scenes efforts by top Department of Homeland Security officials to build a false narrative to support President Donald Trump's bogus claims about terrorists crossing the southern border.

Brian Murphy, the principal deputy undersecretary in the department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, said in his complaint that he was told to provide intelligence reports for former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that supported the White House's false argument of a border wall being necessary to keep out large numbers of terrorists crossing into the US from Mexico.

Jim Watson / Getty Images

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is sworn in as she testifies on March 6, 2019.

Despite Murphy's refusal and statements to Nielsen that the documented number of known or suspected terrorists only consisted of no more than three people — not the 3,755 she had told Congress on Dec. 20, 2018 — the former secretary knowingly made false statements to Congress on the topic again on March 6, 2019.

The complaint also says acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop producing intelligence reports on Russian disinformation efforts because it “made the President look bad.”

Ken Cuccinelli, a senior official performing the duties of deputy DHS secretary, also told Murphy to modify intelligence threat assessments on white supremacists to appear "less severe" and include information on the prominence of "violent 'left wing' groups," according to the complaint.

Murphy also says Wolf told him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran.”

CNN was the first to report on the existence and details of the complaint.

Earlier on Wednesday, Wolf gave the “State of the Homeland Address” and singled out Nielsen for her contributions to DHS. Wolf also called China a growing threat to the United States and protesters in Portland "violent rioters" who were attacking federal law enforcement officers.

Murphy claims he was later demoted from his post to assistant to the deputy undersecretary for the DHS Management Division in retaliation for not cooperating. The personnel move prompted him to file his complaint on Tuesday.

Before Murphy was demoted, the Washington Post reported that his office at DHS had compiled intelligence reports on journalists covering protests in Portland, Oregon, who published leaked and unclassified documents. The revelation prompted an immediate outcry, and former officials said the reports damaged the the intelligence office's reputation.

Murphy downplayed the reporting on the issue in the complaint, saying the reporting on the topic was "significantly flawed." Murphy said there were attempts to track publicly available reporting that had information from government sources, but that there were no efforts to surveil journalists' private data.

The chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, ordered Murphy to appear before the committee later this month, saying on Twitter that the alleged actions put "our national security at risk."

Young Latino Voters Say The Fight For Racial Justice Is Pushing Them To Vote In November

According to a new survey, 55.8% of young Latino voters said they’d actively participated in racial equality or Black Lives Matter movements.

Olivier Douliery / Getty Images

People hold placards at the Lincoln Memorial at a protest against racism and police brutality, on August 28, in Washington, DC.

Young Latinos are being pushed to vote in the upcoming election by the protests that have gripped the country throughout the summer over the fight for racial justice, according to new data from a national survey of Latino voters between the ages of 18 and 34.

The survey, conducted by Telemundo and BuzzFeed News earlier this summer, also found that young Latinos are motivated by the coronavirus pandemic's outsize influence on their community.

The country’s renewed push for racial justice after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the effects of the pandemic, and immigration reform have pushed young Latino voters to become engaged in the upcoming election, according to the survey.

The protests that have taken place across the country have become a focal point of the presidential race. The Republican National Convention heavily featured segments against widespread demonstrations and in favor of “law and order,” including an address from a Missouri couple who had been charged with unlawful use of a weapon after aiming guns at a group of protesters in their neighborhood. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden both visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, last week after protests erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

According to the survey, 55.8% of young Latino voters said they’d actively participated in racial equality or Black Lives Matter movements by protesting or boycotting, and half of young Latino people said protests across the country have motivated them to vote in the upcoming election. “Racial and ethnic social equality” motivates 62.7% of young Latino voters, according to the survey and 57% said reducing police brutality has pushed them to turn out for the election.

“Racial and ethnic social equality” was identified as the most important social or political issue for their generation by a majority of the Latino voters, with 16.6% identifying it as the top overall issue.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed racial inequities in how communities across the country are affected by its consequences, and it’s motivating Latino voters ahead of the general election. Just 24.6% of young Latino voters “somewhat or strongly approve” of the president’s response to the pandemic, compared to 35.6% of young non-Latino voters.

In the survey, 41.1% of Latino voters indicated that the pandemic has strongly motivated them to vote in the upcoming election. Part of that motivation comes from their own experiences: 13% of Latino voters said they have worked in a high-risk job without enough protection over the course of the pandemic, compared to 11.3% of non-Latino voters. And 12.5% of Latino people said that they had lost their job because of the coronavirus, compared to 10.3% of young non-Latino people.

The upcoming election has created conflicting feelings for many young Latino voters, with wide support for Biden matching a belief that Trump will ultimately win. The survey found that 53% of young Latino Biden supporters believe he’ll win the election, compared to the 52% of young Latino Trump supporters who believe that Trump will win.

While 60% of young Latino voters say they are supporting Biden’s campaign, recent polling has shown the former vice president lagging behind with Latinos overall compared to where Hillary Clinton was in 2016. A recent poll from Equis Research, which surveyed 1,081 Latinos in Florida, found that while Biden led Trump 53% to 37% among Latino voters, Biden was still behind where Clinton performed, according to 2016 exit polling from CNN.

Despite the Biden campaign’s lagging performance among Latino voters in Florida compared to Clinton’s 2016 performance, 75.3% of young Latino voters surveyed in the Telemundo–BuzzFeed News poll indicated that they believe it is more important to vote in this election than the 2016 election.

The survey questioned 638 people who identified as Latino and 685 non-Latino people between the ages of 18 and 34. It was conducted from June 5 to June 22.

MORE ON THE SURVEY

• Young Latino Voters Say They’re Excited To Vote. But They’re Nervous Trump Supporters Will Cheat.Ryan Brooks · Aug. 5, 2020

• 

  Ryan Brooks is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.

#HIDUTVA 

Activists Are Demanding Facebook Suspend An Indian Executive Who Shielded Anti-Muslim Hate Speech

“I don’t know what the damn problem is at Facebook with anti-Muslim hate, but I would just say at this point that they don’t seem to care.”

Pranav DixitBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From New Delhi September 9, 2020

Erin Scott / Reuters



Mark Zuckerberg


NEW DELHI, India — More than 40 human rights groups and internet watchdog organizations including the Southern Poverty Law Center and Muslim Advocates are calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend Ankhi Das, the company’s public policy director for India, South, and Central Asia, after the Wall Street Journal revealed that she decided not to apply the social network's hate speech policies to politicians from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party who posted anti-Muslim hate speech.


In an open letter, the US- UK-, and New Zealand–based groups demanded that Das be put on leave pending an audit of Facebook India, and “should be removed from her role” if the audit substantiated the Journal’s reporting. They also asked for Facebook to work with civil society groups and human rights activists in India.


“It’s high time Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook take anti-Muslim hatred seriously and change how its policies are applied in Asia and across the world.”


“It’s high time Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook take anti-Muslim hatred seriously and change how its policies are applied in Asia and across the world,” Heidi Beirich, executive vice president for strategy at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, one of the signatories of the letter, said in a statement. “The scandal in the Indian office, where anti-Muslim and other forms of hatred were allowed to stay online due to religious and political bias, is appalling and the leadership in that office complicit.”

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

One of Facebook’s most powerful executives, Das came under scrutiny after the Wall Street Journal showed that she had intervened to protect T. Raja Singh, a state-level BJP politician, and at least three other Hindu nationalists, from Facebook’s hate speech rules, saying that doing so would be bad for business. She also claimed that the company “lit a fire” to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s social media campaign before he won elections in 2014.

Last month, Das apologized to Facebook employees for sharing a post on her personal Facebook page that called India’s Muslims a “degenerate community” for whom “nothing except purity of religion and implementation of Shariah matter.”

The reports have sparked a political controversy in India, Facebook’s largest market, which has more than 300 million users. Last week, more than a dozen members of a parliamentary committee grilled Ajit Mohan, Facebook’s top executive in India, about its content moderation policies. A separate government panel is also investigating whether hate speech on Facebook sparked riots in New Delhi earlier this year, where more than 50 people — mostly Muslims — were killed.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has come under scrutiny for not taking down content that instigates violence. Earlier this month, BuzzFeed News reported that Facebook failed to take down an event created by the Kenosha Guard, a self-proclaimed militia, where members discussed plans to “kill looters and rioters” despite being flagged 455 times. The page asked followers to bring weapons to an event meant to counterprotests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. A 17-year-old at the protest allegedly shot and killed two protesters.

In Myanmar, Facebook was used to spread anti-Muslim hate speech, including calls for violence against the minority Rohingya community. In 2018, Facebook acknowledged that it was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar after soldiers in the country massacred thousands of Rohingya people and forced more than 800,000 people to flee into Bangladesh. The United Nations described it as genocide.

“Moderation bias in Facebook’s Delhi office affects many South Asian markets, including hundreds of millions of users across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh,” said Dia Kayyali, program manager for tech and advocacy at Witness, a Brooklyn-based human right nonprofit organization and one of the letter’s signatories, told BuzzFeed News.

Kayyali said that although human rights organizations from India and South Asia have weighed in on the letter, concerns about backlash from India’s increasingly authoritarian government kept them from signing it. “Given the declining rights situations across the region, many organizations felt unsafe in engaging in any public advocacy at this time, especially given the existence of warning signs of genocide,” they said.

“I don’t know what the damn problem is at Facebook with anti-Muslim hate,” said Beirich, who said she had repeatedly brought the topic up with Facebook executives, including the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. “But I would just say at this point that they don’t seem to care. The needle doesn’t move.”


MORE ON THIS
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Without otters, Alaskan reefs more vulnerable to climate change, urchins


Without sea otters around to eat urchins, Alaska's kelp forests and algal reefs have been left vulnerable to overgrazing. Photo by Matt Knoth/Flickr

Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Keystone predators provide ecological equilibrium, a kind of stability that allows ecosystems withstand sudden changes. Without them, the effects of climate change are more severe.

That's the case off the coast of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, where coral reefs and kelp forests have been left vulnerable to climate change and sea urchin predation in the absence of the Aleutian sea otter, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Since the 1990s, the Aleutian sea otter has been "functionally extinct," researchers said.

"A 'functional extinction' indicates that, although the sea otter has not gone extinct as a species, its abundance is so low that it no longer has a meaningful ecological impact in the ecosystem," Douglas Rasher, senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, told UPI in an email.

Without sea otters around, local sea urchin populations have exploded. Having thinned the region's once-dense kelp forests, these voracious herbivores have begun gnawing their way through the coralline algae that forms the reef on which kelp grows.

Uranium-thorium dating suggests that some of the reefs, formed by the red alga Clathromorphum nereostratum, are more than 800 years old.

To better understand the resiliency of these unique reefs, researchers examined the layers of calcified skeleton formed by the algae. Each year, the algae builds new layers, cementing a record of their growth.

By examining the thickness of the different algal layers, researchers were able to identify previous sea urchin grazing events.

The layers showed earlier grazing events corresponded with the decline of otters during the height of the fur trade, but that the region's coralline algae was able to withstand previous surges in local sea urchin populations.

Today, the coral-like reefs aren't fairing so well.

To figure out why sea urchins are proving more deadly than they were more than a century ago, researchers paired algae and sea urchins in tanks of seawater back in the lab. Some tanks featured cooler, less acidic conditions, comparable to preindustrial seawater, while other tanks featured temperature and acidity levels comparable to modern ocean conditions.

The experiments proved warmer, more acidic ocean conditions, caused by anthropogenic climate change, have made Clathromorphum nereostratum algae more vulnerable to lethal sea urchin grazing.

"Although sea urchins likely abounded in the Aleutian Islands during and after the fur trade, our experiments indicate that the alga's skeleton was stronger, and rates of sea urchin grazing were much lower, during those past centuries," Rasher said.

The findings serve as a reminder that climate change doesn't alter ecosystems in isolation.

"Our study shows that species interactions and climate change interact in complex ways, highlighting that we must study the processes of predator loss and climate change together," Rasher said.

Sea urchins have proliferated in a variety of ecosystems beyond Alaska's reefs. From the coast of Kenya to the Caribbean islands to the Gulf of Maine, the loss of large fish and other marine predators have led to the explosion of local sea urchin populations, decimating kelp forests and algal reefs.

Reefs and kelp forests often serve as an anchor for diverse marine ecosystems, providing both food and shelter to variety of species. When they become overgrazed, biodiversity declines.

"New consumers are also showing up in many marine ecosystems," Rasher said. "Tropicalization of kelp forests of western Australia has caused the arrival of new herbivorous fishes, who are now preventing the recovery of kelp forests after marine heat waves occur. Moreover, new carnivores are shifting poleward in the Gulf of Maine where red hake and black sea bass have arrived for the first time in recorded history."

upi.com/7037153

Even Climate Scientists Are Freaked Out By This Year’s Wildfires

"We have not reached the peak. In fact, no one knows where the peak is,” one expert said.

Peter AldhousBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 10, 2020

Josh Edelson / Getty Images 

FIRENADOES ARE OCCURRING MORE FREQUENTLY DUE TO

THE FIERCENESS OF WILDFIRES


Butte County firefighters watch as the Bear fire towers over their truck in Oroville, California, Sept. 9, 2020.


Across large parts of California, daylight never arrived on Sept. 9. Caught under a vast sheet of smoke streaming from fires to the north, the San Francisco Bay Area woke to a sickly orange glow that only darkened as the morning progressed.


Just over the border in Oregon, thousands of people were evacuated from the city of Medford as the fast-growing Glendower fire surged up Interstate 5, burning through the towns of Phoenix and Talent to the southeast.


Oregon Gov. Kate Brown described the weather conditions that spawned her state’s fires as a “once-in-a-generation event.” Others have called it a “new normal” in the face of climate change.

But this isn’t simply a new normal, because it will likely get worse: Climate change is bound to pile on several more decades of warming and drying in the West, no matter what steps the world’s nations take to cut carbon emissions.

“This is very much a way station on the path to a new future,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told BuzzFeed News. “We have not reached the peak. In fact, no one knows where the peak is.”

Swain and other experts are as alarmed as everybody else about what’s going on — but they’re not surprised.

“I admit to being a little freaked out right now,” Alexandra Syphard, chief scientist with Vertus Wildfire Insurance Services and an ecologist at San Diego State University, told BuzzFeed News. “But nothing so far has happened that couldn’t have been predicted.”


Swain added that the increased severity of the wildfire season also takes an emotional toll on the scientists paying the most attention. “This is horrible. It is very hard to process,” he said. “Personally, I’m exhausted by all of this.”

These experts had few words of comfort for anxious West Coasters who yearn for a return to normalcy in the months and years to come. “For some of the scientists, that dread is amplified even more because we know what’s coming,” Swain said.

Scientists also warned that there are no quick fixes to the West Coast’s fire woes. Reducing the inevitable damage from future big wildfires will require restrictions to curb the sprawl into wildlands that has been a defining feature of California’s real estate development in recent decades, strict building codes to ensure that at-risk homes are designed for fire safety, and efforts to reduce the number of fires ignited by people, power lines, and other infrastructure.

Given that it’s only going to get hotter and drier in the foreseeable future, it will also require efforts to make California’s forests less of a tinderbox. After decades of misguided attempts to suppress wildfires in the Sierra Nevada, the spine of mountains that runs down the east of the state, the forests are much denser than they would naturally be. What’s ultimately needed, experts say, is a return to historical conditions, when an even greater area burned each year — but with much less ferocity, leaving big trees to survive instead of blowing to the winds and falling as ash.

This will not be comfortable. Storied landscapes will change as some burned forests are replaced by more drought- and heat-tolerant scrubland. And West Coasters may have to get used to smoky skies as state and federal officials literally fight fire with fire via prescribed burns to try to reduce fuel for wildfires.


Widespread power cuts, as utilities shut down the grid to prevent their power lines from sparking fires during high winds, will also become a common experience. A study published last month from Swain and others estimated that Northern California will experience an average of 1.6 million person-days of annual power cuts in the years to come, based on historical climate conditions and utilities’ stated thresholds for when they will pull the plug.

So far, more than 3.1 million acres in California have burned in 2020, according to the state's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. That has eclipsed the state’s previous record of more than 1.9 million acres, set in 2018 — and there are still at least a couple of months of the fire season still to go.


Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via Cal Fire



The total area burned by wildfire in California by year from 1987.

A Perfect Storm

The total area burned this year isn’t the whole story. Indeed, nationally, this isn’t even a particularly severe fire season by that measure: According to the National Interagency Fire Center, just under 5.3 million acres had burned in 2020 by Sept. 10, below the 10-year average of 5.76 million acres for the year to date. That’s largely because it’s been a relatively quiet year for fires away from the coastal states.


What is more worrying is that so many large fires have erupted in such a short time in a relatively small area, including the south of Oregon, around the San Francisco Bay, and the Sierra Nevada mountains. The fires have burned within touching distance of major population centers, affecting millions of people with unbreathable air and a burnt orange sky.

The latest set of wildfires kicked off Aug. 17, when an unusual series of “dry lightning” storms swept across Northern California, igniting dozens of fires, some of which coalesced into three massive complexes that are now the first, third, and fourth largest fires in recorded state history.

“Up until the lightning siege, it was a rather unremarkable season,” John Abatzoglou, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced, told BuzzFeed News.


Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via Cal Fire



Major incidents recorded by Cal Fire from 2010 to 2020. Each fire is a circle that is scaled by the area burned, centered on the date the alarm was sounded. The current season is remarkable for the multiple large fires that erupted in a short period from mid-August.


Since this lightning siege, the West Coast has been hit by successive record-breaking heat waves, further drying the landscape and heightening the potential for rapid fire spread. The result has been more fires in California, Oregon, and Washington that have burned with an intensity that has shocked even seasoned fire-watchers. Some of these fires have generated their own weather systems, including the Creek fire that erupted in the Sierra National Forest in Fresno County, California, over the Labor Day weekend, requiring more than 200 campers to be evacuated by military helicopters.



CIRA / NOAA
The Creek fire exploded in area and formed a massive smoke plume on Sept. 5.


“It’s hard to not focus on the extent burned, but the nature and behavior of the fires is one of the most astonishing things,” Dakota Smith, a satellite analyst with the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University, told BuzzFeed News.

Experts likened the conditions that created this year’s inferno to a perfect storm, as critical fire weather was unleashed into an environment that was already primed to explode into flames. The unnatural density of the state’s forests is just part of the problem: They also contain some 150 million dead trees, mostly in the southern Sierra Nevada, weakened by drought and finished off by bark beetle infestations.

“There’s not been time for them to decompose,” Kate Wilkin, a fire ecologist at San Jose State University, told BuzzFeed News. “This was a particularly sensitive time in that process.”


Then there is the steady march of climate change, which has warmed and dried the region, making the fire season longer. According to a 2019 study, the annual area burned by wildfires in California has increased fivefold since the early 1970s. A warming and drying trend is locked in for several more decades, even if nations take rapid measures to cut emissions.

“We are going to have to embrace more fire.”

The main focus, then, is trying to thin the forests and reduce fire loads. But how to do so in a safe and effective way is an intense scientific controversy. Forestry interests tend to back mechanical thinning, but many ecologists are concerned that once logging companies get involved, they tend to take the bigger trees that are most important to retain for a healthy forest ecosystem, rather than thinning out undergrowth and saplings to mimic the effects of natural fires.

In terms of area, the extent of California’s historic fires, which were encouraged by Indigenous tribes to manage the landscape, exceeded even this year’s conflagration. In 2007, a University of California, Berkeley, research team studying traditional Native American burning practices and records including fire scars on ancient trees estimated that before European settlement of California, an average of more than 4.4 million acres burned each year. Other estimates put that figure as high as 12 million acres a year. The difference is that these were much lower-intensity fires that left the biggest trees alive, rather than destroying everything in their path.

“We killed off the natural fire regime,” Swain said.

Restoring California’s fire ecology to something more like its natural state will be hard and potentially hazardous — given that any fire can spiral out of control.


It is also likely to cause concerns over air quality. “Skies were likely smoky much of the summer and fall in California during the prehistoric period,” the UC Berkeley researchers noted in their 2007 paper.

Cal Fire’s target is to reduce fuel loads across the state across more than 500,000 acres per year, using a combination of mechanical thinning, timber removal, and prescribed burns.

In the most recent fiscal year, actions by the state, private landowners, and the federal government — which is actually responsible for most of California’s forests — got about halfway to that target, according to Cal Fire spokesperson Lynne Tolmachoff. But the vast majority of that was through timber removal and mechanical thinning, rather than the prescribed burns that many ecologists want to become the norm.

“To diminish the ‘fire deficit’ and thereby mitigate fire risk, the Forest Service and partners will need to step up the use of prescribed fires in concert with mechanical treatments,” Babette Anderson, a US Forest Service spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News by email.

Whatever path the West takes in the next few decades, experts warn, it is going to involve more fires — both good ones and bad.

“We are going to have to embrace more fire on the landscape,” Swain said.


MORE ON THIS
How A Booming Population And Climate Change Made California’s Wildfires Worse Than Ever

Peter Aldhous · July 28, 2018

Shocking Photos Show The Hellish Scenes From The West Coast Wildfires

Clarissa-Jan Lim · Sept. 9, 2020

California And Oregon Residents Described Apocalyptic Landscapes As Wildfires Raged

Jessica Garrison · Sept. 10, 2020

The Fires Burning In California Right Now Are Already Among The Worst In History And The Season Is Just Starting 

Ryan Mac · Aug. 22, 2020

Peter Aldhous is a Science Reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.